Actually its even easier than that, windows media Center has parental controls so you can require a password before it will play above a certain rating, and you can always hide the folders that have the R rated movies as WMC won't have any problem playing from hidden folders, just put in your password when it comes time to watch your R rated movies and tada! It all works easy peasy.
If you would like to have all the artwork and synopsis and the full nine yards but don't feel like doing all that work I'd suggest just following this simple how to which provides links to the two little freeware programs that will set the whole thing up and do all the work for you. if you want the movies hidden from prying eyes when you first run Yammm which is the program that takes care of all the metadata and artwork simply check "hide playlist members" under settings (if you forget you'll find the config in your all programs or can type yam from the start box) and that is all there is to it, if the kid goes to the folder all he will see is an empty folder, the actual video files will be hidden. Too easy and you really don't have to do anything, just let it run its service (less than 35Mb when its downloading the artwork) and ignore it.
One word for the impatient, because the dev didn't want to slam the free movie DB he has it take its time downloading artwork, I've found with around 300 movies it takes about a day for the whole thing to be updated, but of course you can fire up WMC right away, it'll just take about a day for all the artwork and data about each individual movie to be integrated into WMC. But once it does...wow, you have a full synopsis with art, date the movie was made, genre, its all filled out, and of course for young and old its easier to just click on the poster of the movie you want instead of reading down a list,
so give it a try, I've been using this on my HTPCs as well as my own PC for a few months now and its great and if you add more movies later simply rerun file2folderGUI again, takes less than 10 seconds and it'll put everything in the correct folder format so the metadata can be applied.
First of all, are you 12 years old? if not then you should probably be informed that the SECOND you start typing "M$" the first thing 90% of the people that read these posts will do is say "douchebag" and pass right on by, so you could have the most insightful post in the world but nobody will give a fuck because you just labeled yourself as this guy aka "basement loser troll".
Second if you would have read my GP post I had already answered that this is NOT the "Star Trek Rule" as the Windows Blue memo makes it clear that as long as Ballmer is in charge there will be NO going back, its gonna be full retard ahead with MSFT making MSFT hardware running MSFT software sold in MSFT stores for a higher than Apple markup, because "God damn it we're better than Apple and we need to get the stock price up!"
Finally you are again wrong if you are referring to Win 7 over Vista, they did a complete gutting of most of the Vista code, new kernel, new memory subsystem, new driver subsystem, even the few things they kept from Vista like Readyboost and UAC got pretty big rewrites. Comparing Vista to 7 is like saying "Well Win98 and 2K3 Server are the same, its made by the same company so anybody who bought it was a sucker" while ignoring the incredible number of changes under the hood. Vista in many ways was WinME, where they had a couple of good ideas that were executed poorly and ultimately ended up with a broken mess whereas 7 like XP took those few good ideas and a bunch of major under the hood rewrites and rebuilds to make a truly solid product. In fact the only other MSFT product I can compare Win 7 to is 2K3 X64 workstation, aka WinXP X64, because in both cases you have a product that is just so much more rock solid than anything they had previously released it just isn't even funny. I have seen plenty of Vista BSODs working on customers machines because Vista screwed itself up but only with XP X64 and Win 7 have I never seen a BSOD that wasn't related to a hardware failure.
Linux is a corpse and will be gone in less than 5 years from all places outside the server room, it'll be locked down boxes like ChromeTops and iPads. And you have obviously never worked in a shop or you'd know rep and supporting what you sell is everything and Linux has such a piss poor record when it comes to shitting all over consumer drivers it ain't even funny. I'm sure if you use the power of the Google you'll find the "Hairyfeet Challenge" which i have posted for a couple of years now, still no takers because they know as well as i do what will happen in the end, the Windows machine will have 100% functioning drivers, even after the SPs and hundreds of updates, while the Linux machine will shit all over its own drivers and end up broken.
So thanks but no thanks, my time is $35 an hour and Linux simply costs more than Windows when it comes to after sales support. personally I blame Torvalds as every other OS ON THE PLANET has a stable driver ABI EXCEPT for Linux, BSD, Solaris, Windows, OSX, iOS, Android, fucking OS/2 has a stable ABI, Linux is the ONLY one that still has the drivers break on updates.
Its just a shame that ChromeOS is gonna be strictly black box and OEM only as i would be happy to give it a go, Google actually puts quality control into their products and don't break shit with every release like Torvalds and company.
Want some advice? Grab one of the 12 inch AMD netbooks while you can, a EEE 1215b, 1225b (make SURE its got a B at the end, otherwise its an Atom plus ION and sucks), or the HP DMZ1 are all GREAT choices and feel more like an ultraportable than a netbook.
I have the 1215B and it holds 8GB of RAM (got it for $30 and it was only $8 diff between 6GB and 8GB so I figured WTF) weighes less than 2.5 pounds, still gets 4 hours on a battery after 3 years (originally a little over 5 with BT and WiFi, nearly 6 without) does 1080P over HDMI, and just for shits and giggles I loaded some games on it and L4D, Portal 1&2, and Torchlight 1&2 all play great on it. Hell there are even videos of guys playing Crysis 2 on the DMZ1. Oh and full VM support so if I have to go to a dodgy website to get drivers for a customer i just fire up a Puppy Linux VM and get the drivers from there. So if it were me I'd be looking to grab one of those 12 inch AMD netbooks before they are gone, they really are great well built little units. There is even how tos to add a touchscreen or SSD if that is what you want.
But I agree after looking at it the ChromeBook "dev mode hack" looks like just that, a bad hack, and it appears to have more than a little finger crossing along with a lot of CLI bullshit. Personally I don't think jumping through that many hoops is worth it, especially when its unknown if doing so will void your warranty. With low priced units like that you get higher failure rates due to lack of quality control and i personally wouldn't want to risk voiding my warranty, I'd get one of those Win 8 quad laptops and use Start8 before i messed with all that crap.
I give you hard data, you return with bullshit. I provide multiple citations backing up my position, you return with anecdotes.
Sorry but until you can return with something other than "my best friend's cousin's gardener sold his PC for a tablet, swear to God!" I think I'm gonna have to go with the hard numbers. Now if you wanted to argue that tablets are taking the little niche that netbooks had? i agree, but I am gonna need something other than "I know some people" to show that any significant number is giving up PCs for tablets.
No they didn't, and its "karma" not "khama". The simple fact is the moronic Ballmernator killed Windows phone before the first unit ever shipped. You see the carriers want to take a page out of Ballmer's book and "Fucking kill Skype" because it cuts into the hefty profits they make, Ballmer like an idiot bought Skype (for waaaay too much money) and now the carriers wouldn't piss on a Windows phone if you gave it to them free.
Is Google being dickish about YouTube? Probably, after all like Ballmer and Skype they too paid waaay too much money for the thing and want to squeeze every last penny out of the property, but they might as well not bother screwing WinPhone because Ballmer did a better job than they ever could. I don't think in all my years in tech I've seen a company run THAT poorly before, but Ballmer can bitch and whine all he wants because as long as MSFT owns Skype you can give it up chuck, the phones ain't going nowhere.
You sir should be upmodded to a thousand, because this is something I've been trying to get the Linux advocates to understand for years...you HAVE to have Quickbooks, the SMBs live or die by Quickbooks and frankly the few ersatz FOSS programs out there trying to fit that niche are as bad a replacement as Gimp is a suitable replacement for Photoshop for graphics professionals.
I don't know how many SMBs I have that have their entire company, from inventory to accounting to taxes, run by a "Quickbooks girl" (and for some reason its almost ALWAYS a girl, you'd think they had a union or something) that everybody just hands the paperwork to and she takes care of the entire company. You really can't compare any other product to it, you really can run a whole business just with this one product and having it Windows only really is a deal breaker for Linux in the SMB market.
I'm sorry you are wrong, with Windows you have ONE company controlling the OS and the release has ONE kernel and ONE subsystem, whereas Linux is a bunch of prima donna devs that don't give a rat's ass what the other guys are doing, the kernel devs don't talk to the driver guys who don't talk to X-Server team who couldn't give a wet shit about the DE teams, so what you get is a big fucking mess held together with CLI and duct tape, oh lord the duct tape.
This is why Google will be able to succeed with Android and ChromeOS where Linux has failed, they have the money to fork the whole damned thing and say "Fuck you prima donnas, either you STFU and get your ass on board, using OUR SDK to build for OUR OS, or you can fuck right off because we don't care about your bullshit" and will be able to bring real quality control to the platform. Hell even Canonical couldn't pull this off as while they had their own bits on top they were still at the mercy of guys like the Pulse team and the kernel devs, which is why Dell has to run their own (badly out of date) repos just to support the piddling handful of hardware they sell Linux on, because the devs keep shitting all over their drivers. That is pretty fucking sad when you are talking about less than 2 dozen machines in the whole fucking line up.
That said you are 100% right that Windows IS too fucking high, which is why so many gamers pirate their OS. For quite awhile now MSFT under Ballmer has been fucking everyone, the OEMs, the consumer, the SMBs, the enterprise, because all Steve "Did you know I have a degree in marketing?" Ballmer gives a flying fuck about is Wall Street and the stock price, NOT selling a good product at an affordable price and thus gaining his company more share. He is the classic PHB, more like short sighted assholes like Bobby Kotick at Activision than Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, all the Ballmernator gives a shit about is squeeeezing every last red cent out of every thing he can to try to please the street and bump up the stock.
How many times have we seen this kind of ass cancer on American business, the CEO that only cares about fucking the customers for every dime he can and trying to pump up the stock price? And it ALWAYS ends the same, with the company in ruins. Westinghouse, Circuit City, EA, Activision, AMD, the list goes on and on of short sighted CEOs that only cared about shaking the customer for every cent and pumping the stock, it has NEVER ended on a happy note, just as it won't here.
Final prediction for MSFT, from the guy that called both Vista and Win 8 months before they came out (I got it half right on 7, I said fixing UAC did a BIG help to the OS but I didn't predict all the third party support for jumplists and for the OS itself making it such an easy drop in replacement for XP, I thought they would drag ass like they did on Vista) and my prediction is this: If Ballmer isn't fired in 3 years you'll see the desktops and laptops all but replaced by ChromeTops and ChromeBooks because the OEMs won't have any choice, it'll be switch or die, Apple will own the high end, Google the low, and MSFT will be the new RIM when they could have been the new IBM. Instead of hanging onto their legacy customers and then slowly moving into new markets like IBM did they are gonna burn the bridges and will end up with nothing but legacy business installs, and like RIM even those will be looking at exit strategies.
Again I have never seen any company just outright destroy itself with such a fundamentally stupid idea before, the closest I can compare it to is THQ putting themselves into bankruptcy by spending $110 million on a drawing tablet for the consoles and thinking that would actually ever be anything more than a teeny niche, or Atari buying more PacMan carts than their were 2600 consoles...but even THAT isn't THIS stupid, here they have 2 fucking years worth of data that says in 50 foot flaming letters that the consumers DO NOT WANT THIS and every single product tied to the new "Hey we'll just become Ap
This is true and on top of that they have completely switched designs, previous designs were VLIW and the new design is vector based GCN, so naturally when doing something as massive as a complete change to the architecture of the chip itself its gonna take some time to get all the bugs worked out.
Now that said this right here is why I always stay a couple of gens behind when it comes to GPUs, because frankly the higher end GPUs (the x8xx and x9xx chips especially) have been so badass that by staying a couple of gens behind you still get great graphics without nearly the headaches and at lower cost as well. I learned this lesson the hard way when I USED to be bleeding edge and found that by the time they had all the bugs worked out of the card, whether it be ATI or Nvidia, that the price of the card would have dropped by a pretty good amount leaving me feeling...well kinda dumb for buying bleeding edge just to be the beta tester. I understand how high tech these designs are so I don't blame 'em for selling the hardware before the software is done but that doesn't mean that I need to be the beta.
For an example I'm currently running an HD4850, these cards were nearly $300 when release, I paid $70 when the 6xxx chips came out and even today it still cranks out the pretty. Since its about to be 4 gens behind for my BDay in 2 months I'll move up to an HD6850 or HD6870, these cards were nearly $400 when first released, I'll pay $100-$120. I'll still have a 256bit graphics card, hell the one I'm looking at is 384bit so I may get an upgrade in that dept, and I'll double my GPU RAM while going from GDDR 3 to GDDR 5.
By sticking to a couple gen behind I can still play ALL the games, still have them look great enough people drool when they watch me do a "cool guys don't look at explosions" in something like Just Cause II, it saves me money and most importantly they have all the major bugs worked out by then so I can just plug it in and my games "just work" with no muss or fuss. Now if you'll excuse me I got a ton of games on the Steam Xmas sale and feel like a little Borderlands, when playing a franchise I like to go in story order.
What threats? This is simply a perfect example of those that say "Oh you don't need guns" showing why THEY don'y need guns....because they can HIRE guns! What, you don't have the money to hire guns? Then get robbed or killed you filthy peasant! We shall drink our fancy coffees with our private armies and laugh at your misery...hah!
I'm sorry but if you went from 8GB to 32GB and it suddenly slowed down and got crashy and your IT dept didn't catch it? Then they ain't all that hot. A LOT of boards have serious problems with setting the correct RAM timings when you do a huge upgrade like that, also many boards simply won't take what I call "hot" RAM that pulls a little more juice than spec. let me guess...running high speed DDR 3, yes? Most of the really high speed DDR 3 is "hot" RAM and frankly you need the RAM approved by the OEM that made the board or a gamer board made to run hot RAM to run it. Check the UEFI settings and look at what voltages and speeds its reporting, compare this to the board specs, then run Memtest on the RAM. Five will get you ten that memtest will NOT pass on that board.
You can't really blame Windows if you just throw an upgrade in there willy nilly and not do your homework which is what it sounds like here. Frankly most of the fast speed DDR 3 is running out of spec and I've seen the speeds the stick will run stably at vary pretty damned wildly, even when you are talking matched pairs from the same company. Also remember with RAM so cheap these companies cut corners left and right and QC isn't what it used to be, I'm seeing a LOT more RAM that doesn't pass muster, either it has bad cells or simply won't run at its higher rated speeds. If it doesn't pass memtest its a bad chip or clocked too high, try setting the RAM timings manually, starting at its lowest setting, then run memtest again and see if it passes. But I have seen this kind of a reaction a LOT in the faster clocked memory which is what I bet you are running, most that go out and get 32GB of RAM is gonna go for the fastest they can find.
Sorry but you are wrong and here is why: when looking at the numbers and comparing them to the previous year at the exact same period, which just FYI had an even worse economic outlook than we did this year, computer sales are down by more than 13% and I'm sorry but you don't have THAT big a drop, especially during the run up to Xmas, unless something is REALLY wrong or you have a product people don't want to buy. Even the OEMs are flat footed saying that Win 8 units just aren't selling which is why you see more and more places like Tiger showing Win 7 machines for sale, nobody wants Win 8.
So frankly it doesn't have a damned thing to do with ME or MY opinion, honestly if I wanted to i could put up with the bullshit or just hack the shell, i just don't see enough benefits to put up with bullshit like tying everything to a MSFT Live account or hacking the shell to make it worth fooling with. Nope what this is about is the simple fact that this is the typical user reaction to Windows 8 only she doesn't get frustrated as badly or curse like many of those trying it at the shop did. Hell I got people calling me I haven't heard from in years going "You still got that shop? Yeah see i went to look at Best Buy for a laptop and all they had was that 'weird new Windows' and I REALLY don't like it. Is there any way you can get me one with the 'good Windows' on it?"
It has NOTHING to do with opinion, or taste, it has to do with the fact MSFT put out a Frankenstein mess of an OS, designed for an interface that less than 2% of ALL computers made or even sold in stores even has, and which is NOT intuitive, or discoverable, or in any way easier or friendlier than the product that came before. I'm not the one writing articles like "Windows 8..Yes it is THAT bad" I'm simply pointing out the reasons WHY it is THAT bad, just as I did with Vista. Sadly by SP2 they had pretty much fixed the problems with Vista but people had already moved on, I honestly don't think they can fix Windows 8. Even if they kill the Metro UI you still have everything being tied to a MSFT account, ads in the OS, and a mish mash of ribbonized and non ribbonized programs. Not to mention there are SOME controls you can only get to through control panel in desktop mode and SOME that you can only get through metro so unlike some here I don't think they can just "patch metro away" as they moved too much crap into it already.
Like it or not there isn't gonna be a Windows anymore, you are gonna have Apple and ersatz Apple, MSFT is even announced they are building their own hardware and Surface was just the start, you'll have MSFTPhone and MSFTDesktop and MSFTLaptop, all probably priced even higher than Apple just to cement the fail like they did with Surface pricing compared to iPad.
So while you ARE correct that not as many are buying and NO its not that they are replacing them with cellphones like the press keeps harping about, or with tablets, but the average user just can't stress out even a first gen Core Duo or Phenom X4 you just don't have numbers drop THAT bad unless you have a product that the customer is turned off by, and that is Win 8 in a nutshell.
I looked at the cheap upgrade as well, I was gonna buy a copy and stick it in a corner in case i ran into software in the future that needed Win 8 but the "We tie everything to your account oh and do you have a CC? We have an appstore ya know" was the fucking deal breaker for me. When I took advantage of the Win 7 cheap upgrade i got a nice little green box, no different than the retail upgrade in stores, and on install it asked if I wanted upgrade or clean and since it was a new drive there was no "OMG you gotta have zee Windows previous installed" crap and away it went. I was impressed enough I turned around and bought the family pack and switched the whole household over.
Now they want you to pay nearly double for a fricking disc, it checks for an install so you have to jump through THAT hoop, and as you pointed out its picky as fuck about that, and of course then the final straw about the accounts. I'm sure its so they can try to push you into their appstore but I don't give a fuck, if they have a good appstore I'd use it but I'll be damned if they get me on it by bugging the fuck out of me and tying everything to it which is just a security nightmare. so if my fricking Windows Live I had to set up for Bioshock II gets hacked my fricking desktop is vulnerable too? Fuck that noise.
I'll hang onto Win 7 until/unless games stop being released for it which by then hopefully either ballmer's fat stupid ass will be fired or somebody will have a viable exit strategy for us gamers that doesn't involve a shitty console, maybe Valve will hook up with the Crossover guys so that the DirectX games will work in Linux who knows. All I know is after running Win 8 from CP to RTM waiting for them to fix the obvious stupidity only to see they actually thought it was a good idea I wouldn't take Win 8 on a bet, I'd fricking use that Vista Basic disc i got setting in the shop before i touch Windows 8 again, I hate it THAT much.
But is that VOTING stock or just class B stock? You DO know there is a difference, yes? this is why guys like Zuckerberg and Ellison can control the company even as they sell stock, because they have class A which counts higher when it comes to voting compared to class B or "common" stock.
So that link you have doesn't really tell us either way, because it doesn't list whether those holders have class A, class B, or a mix of the 2.
Not to mention in every town there is one or more shops that are happy to sell you Windows 7, be it on desktops or laptops, and of course for the past...ohh I'd say at least the last 5 years or so, computers have frankly been so insanely overpowered compared to what the customers actually do with the thing there simply isn't a real reason to upgrade before they die which can be quite awhile. Hell most of my customers simply had me install Win 7 on the systems they had bought from me with XP, why? Because they were duals,triples, and quads and so overpowered that they do everything they want them to so why buy another before that one dies?
But for any of those that think "Win 8 is just the 'Star Trek Rule' in action" nope, take a gooood look as Ballmer has made it clear in his "Windows Blue" memo that this is it, you can have Apple or overpriced MSFT hardware pretending to be Apple, they are gonna copy everything down to the stores and making their own hardware and trying to lock everything down into a black box appstore centric model, so Win 7 is pretty much the last real copy of Windows if Ballmer doesn't get fired.
Frankly I don't see how the OEMs have any choice, MSFT is already fucking the living hell out of them when it comes to Windows licenses (now rumored to be over $50 a copy for Windows Home, with NO breaks on price no matter how many they buy) and is gonna be trying to actively destroy them with their own MSFT branded hardware in 2013. So they really don't have a choice here, either they close their doors or they find a new supplier and I have a feeling Google will be happy to take that business. I predict if the board doesn't quit smoking crack and fire the Ballmernator that in less than 3 years you'll see all the OEMs pushing ChromeTops and ChromeBooks and they'll have a few VERY expensive Windows machines in the corner that they won't advertise and won't give a shit about because it would be like Kmart pushing Walmart brands, all you are doing is helping the company that wants to put you out of business.
So while the ChromeBooks are limted to online now I have a feeling by summer of this year you are gonna see a TON of new models, in all different sizes and prices, all over the retailers and the online. I mean what else can they do? Its that or do like Nvidia did with chipsets and just close the doors, MSFT has made it clear the "future" of Windows is MSFT OSes running on MSFT hardware sold from a MSFT store with a very high MSFT markup, no way they are gonna sell Windows licenses cheap enough for the OEMs to keep selling against them.
To me the sad part will be the death of DIY and the little shops, because as we have seen with the latest Chromebooks they are getting more and more locked down (hell you can't even run Linux on the things without 3 pages worth of CLI and a LOT of finger crossing) so what you will end up with is disposable black boxes, more like cellphones than today's desktops and laptops.
And sorry about the length but this really fucking depresses me, not because of the shop as I've been moving more into home theaters and security setups anyway, but because it looks like we are going back to the 80s with everything locked down and proprietary, its all gonna be soldered chips that boot from locked BIOS into a locked OS that requires everything go through an appstore owned by the company that owns the OS, but people standing in line to buy overpriced iToys have convinced the IT world that that is what people want,locked down appliances instead of general purpose computing. Fucking shame and I have a feeling the next decade or two is gonna really suck balls and computers will pile up in the landfills like old gaming consoles because you won't be able to do jack shit with them when the corps stop supporting it, but that is what the consumer seems to want.
That is why I have to LMAO at that video the Win 8 apologists keep showing of the 4 year old using Win 8, you know what that video ACTUALLY proves? That 4 year olds have an infinite amount of time and when handed a shiny toy will fuck with it for hours and hours, especially if you can make it "do stuff". hell look at how many hours we wasted when we were little trying to draw anything on an etch a sketch.
I had a Win 8 system in the shop for 7 months for users to play with. Want to see what happens when a person who is NOT 4 years old and doesn't have infinite time uses Win 8? Well here ya go it was pretty much this only with a growing frustration and eventual cursing. its bad when people I haven't seen in years stop me on the street and say "I went to look at a laptop at Best Buy for Christmas and all they had was that new funny Windows and it was just terrible! Can you get me the REAL Windows on a laptop?" which of course "real" always is referring to Win 7.
The bitch is I have been told that it may not be possible to fire Ballmer short of a hostile takeover, because between him and his BFF Bill they own more than 50% of the voting stock. Now if that is true or not I don't know, but if it is true that means it would take old Bill turning on Steve for anything to be done, otherwise the house that Bill built will be the house that Steve knocks down.
I'm afraid that is incorrect, Intel started working on Secure Boot after Blue Pill was shown at Black Hat. If you didn't hear about Blue Pill it was a hack that allowed malware to use the hardware VM support built into the Intel chips to basically shunt the OS onto a VM so that once deployed the malware writer still had control via the hypervisor while you could scan with any scanner you wanted, offline or on, it wasn't gonna catch it or stop it. Needless to say with intel making so much off the server and desktop markets having a bug be able to completely pwn their chips was NOT something they were happy about. Also remember that Intel was on board for the TPM chip and using it for something similar to Secure Boot until everyone had a living shitfit because it would allow DRM so much control over a system.
is MSFT taking advantage and licensing Secure Boot for their ARM products? you betcha but when it comes to who made it and who pushed it that was all Intel just as UEFI is also Intel's baby. This is of course why AMD went with Coreboot, they didn't like the idea of having to pay Intel license fees for every single board their chips are on and Coreboot is free software, both as in beer and freedom.
Sigh...now do you HONESTLY think a business deployment uses NOTHING but a browser? Really? Don't even bring up Libre Office because there is enough incompatibility with Excel and Access to make it a non starter, so frankly the only way you are gonna convert a business over to Linux from Windows is 1.-They pay developers to build native versions of whatever they use or 2.-They only use a browser.
Because supporting many an SMB I can tell you its NEVER the OS, Linux has enough DEs frankly you can make it look and act like anything you want, there are even skins that will make it look like XP if that makes you happy. Nope its ALWAYS the half a dozen "must have mission critical" apps they use that there is NEVER a Linux version for that bites you in the ass. Your Quicken/Quickbooks, your little custom VB and IE intranet apps, the software the head office gives you to input and validate CC numbers ALL of that stuff is Windows only and the cost to get ALL of your data out of whatever format its in and get it into one that a Linux program could use AND paying devs to build new versions of that niche software? frankly makes the cost of Linux several orders of magnitude more than just staying with Windows.
This is why I predict if MSFT doesn't change course like RIM they are gonna end up with a bunch of legacy business customers and not much else, because it will cause the businesses too much to switch and with software assurance contracts they can just stay on Win 7 and not give a shit what MSFT does for the next 7 years. Hell look at how many companies are still running XP, businesses don't care about latest and greatest, all they care about is does their niche software run and the answer on Linux is no so they'll stick with an older version of Windows and call it a day. After all if MSFT doesn't change course they'll still get 5 more years of support on Win 7 before they need to start looking at exit strategies and 7 more years before its EOL.
What is funny is these PR firms are apparently lazy as hell as I've noticed when someone will post a criticism of Win 8 a hell of a lot of the time the "its great!" Win 8 response you'll get back you can drop a line of in Google and they've posted the same reply word for word across dozens of sites, its like the fricking Nigerian prince emails. I don't know which is funnier, the shill copypasta or the "Oh that is not a problem, all you have to do is (big pile of keyboard crap)" which of course i just HAVE to reply with "So THIS is innovation? We need cheat sheets for our OSes again like its 1985?"
I have never seen a company in all my years just up and completely destroy themselves like this, damnedest thing I've ever seen. For those that think Win 8 is just the "Star Trek Rule" in action you might want to look up the "Windows Blue" memo, in it Ballmer lays out what he is doing in 2013 to "save Microsoft"...ready? He is gonna fuck the hell out of the OEMs and pretty much kill Nokia so that MSFT can make phones (just like Apple) tablets (ditto) desktops (notice a pattern?) and laptops (Ray Charles could see through this) and all of which will be priced HIGHER than anything Apple is offering, because dammit high prices MUST mean its good, after all people buy Apple right?
So congrats MSFT haters, you are gonna get to see the company completely self destruct as the PHB in charge torpedoes everything that Gates spent 20+ years building because he is too damned stupid to realize you can't slap a coat of paint on a Pinto and have it compete with Porsche. It took Apple decades to build its rep as a high end brand, Ballmer thinks all he has to do is triple the pricetag on everything and voila! Suddenly Windows is hip and trendy...NOT!
If the board doesn't stop smoking crack and fire this moron I predict in 3 years Apple will own the top, Google will own the bottom, and MSFT will be RIM, with nothing left but legacy business installs and even those will be looking at exit strategies. The truly sad part of it all is the day of the DIY desktop will end, you'll buy a black box Android or Apple and that will be that, unless you have workstation money it'll all be black box like the ChromeBooks.
Because they are outnumbered by about 50 to one by the supermegacorps and the lobbyists working for supermegacorp, who can outspend them something like 100 times over when it comes to buying politicians?
I mean you have exactly ONE, and only one, billion dollar corp and they are just barely over the billion dollar mark. Now look at how much Apple and the big media corps have by way of comparison and then realize thanks to all the tax dodges you are only looking at probably a third of how much they REALLY have. You think kernel.org, Moz,and RH along with the FSF can stand in the room with those guys and not get outbid by several orders of magnitude?
The reasons corps shouldn't be allowed to "speak" with money is because their "speech" quickly drowns out the people. it is SUPPOSED to be one man one vote but with corps being allowed to be treated as people suddenly some people are simply worth more and therefor better than everybody else, and that is just fucked up. Just because you can name a couple of corps that aren't complete douchebags doesn't magically tip the scales in favor of corps, because for every one FSF you have a dozen Goldman Sachs and *.AAs.
Get it, I pointed one of my customers to one when the EEE PC 1215B and 1225Bs were hard to find and he fricking loves it, great performance and decent battery life. I have an AMD Fusion based (E350 1215B) and I have to say it'll run anything I'd want to run on a laptop and still gets over 4 hours after 3 years on the battery, hell I can even game on the thing if I'm stuck somewhere and bored.
BTW if you want even more battery life check out Brazos Tweaker, its a free program that will let you undervolt the chip and change the P-States for even longer battery life, but I get long enough on mine I never bothered. that said on the comments of the Brazos Tweaker website they already have the settings posted for most of the popular units including the DMZ1 and users were reporting up to an extra hour and a half on the battery, not too shabby.
After playing with one frankly if they put me in charge of ChromeOS I could kick the living snot out of Windows in less than 2 years, as it really only has 2 major problems that need fixing. 1.- it needs to lose requiring a 24/7 connection, Google has partially fixed this with Google drive but its still not enough, it needs the ability like Android to run anything on the system with ZERO net access. There are just too many places where free Wifi isn't available to make everything cloud based yet. 2.- Lack of support for popular Windows legacy apps, this could be fixed by Google buying Crossover and bundling that into ChromeOS, with some Google engineers helping out I'm sure you could make Crossover "clicky clicky" simple and it already supports most of the major programs and games so it really wouldn't be hard to do.
If Google did that they could still get all the search data while at the same time taking a large portion of the low end. Frankly MSFT is committing suicide under Ballmer who has made it clear he intends to fuck the OEMs and make MSFT into an ersatz Apple by having them make all their own (overpriced) hardware including phones, desktops, and laptops. Just as the gang of nine got together back in the day and fucked IBM who were trying to do the same thing with OS/2 and the MCA bus so too could Google snatch the OEMs away from MSFT. Its clear the OEMs are NOT happy with MSFT price gouging and using the money they pay to try to squeeze them out of the market and since Google is really more interested in the search data than building hardware this would be a perfect time to swoop in and take the OEMs away from MSFT.
I could easily see a year or so from now the OEMs having tons of different model ChromeBooks and ChromeTops in all different kinds of forms and prices while having a couple of overpriced MSFT Windows units in the corner, it really wouldn't be hard to do as I'd say a good 70%+ of what your average PC user does is net related anyway. A true offline mode would take care of when they are out and no network is available, and Crossover would let them have those one or two "must have" Windows programs. Hell Google could get Valve to port Steam to the ChromeOS and have it work with Crossover to support more and more legacy DirectX games, for the first time in years I could see a day when Windows is nothing but a little niche on the computing landscape.
How so? I can only use the 1215 EEE PC I own and an Acer the same size a customer owns as examples i've used, but they had the battery life (mine got 5 when new, still gets 4 after 3 years, hers got nearly 7 new and a little over 5 now but she has the C60 to my E350), the portability, and the affordable price (I paid $350 for mine with 8GB memory upgrade and case, she got hers for $270) and they did everything a netbook should do, plenty of ports, easy to surf on, and runs most software just fine. In fact I often use mine at the band's practice place to load up and edit multitrack audio on the fly, works great for the basic scratch edits.
So I'd say you are wrong, the only other units I've seen at the 12 inch form factor are either grossly overpriced like the ultrabooks/air or have a crippled OS like the Chromebooks which are worthless if you don't have 24/7 access to Wifi. For those of us that wanted a cheap portable computer with decent performance that didn't make you squint or squeeze your fingers together on a teeny keyboard I think they were the perfect compromise and I will be babying the shit out of my netbook now that I can't get a replacement.
Meh I still say the 12 inchers were the perfect form factor, keyboard big enough to be comfortable, weight still under 3 pounds (my EEE 1215B weighs 2.2 pounds) and the AMD ones frankly were powerful little units, not only can mine get nearly 4 hours on a 3 year old battery but I can plug into any TV and do 1080P over HDMI and for shits and giggles tried gaming on it and GTA:VC, L4D, Torchlight I&II and the Portal series all ran great, there are even videos on YouTube of guys running Crysis 2 on the things.
This will just mean I'll hang onto my EEE for dear life, its a great little unit. I upgraded to 8GB of RAM on the cheap, built in VM support means I can fire up an instance of Puppy Linux when I have to go to a dodgy website to get drivers for a customer in the field, has USB 3 and can charge other devices which is a plus as no need to carry extra cables.
All in all I'd say its a great unit and its a shame MSFT shat all over the market by charging too damned much for Windows licenses (reports are that Win 7 Starter was $35 a copy and Win 7 HP $50) but considering the company is currently being destroyed by Steve "I want to work at Cupertino dammit!" Ballmer the fact that they just fucked themselves out of yet another market really isn't all that surprising. Its a shame that Linux didn't work out on the netbooks but I blame the distros for that, they have frankly been putting out unrealistic as hell system requirements for years which gave the OEMs an excuse to get rid of all their old weak hardware by using Linux with it, just look at the slow as hell SSDs, the weak CPUs and skimpy memory they used when linux was on it, you could really tell they were using the chips they couldn't sell for the Linux units and it really showed when it came to performance. Finally you have Intel that of course used it to shove their shit Atom chips onto the market, those chips were just garbage and using anything with an Atom in it was just painful.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually its even easier than that, windows media Center has parental controls so you can require a password before it will play above a certain rating, and you can always hide the folders that have the R rated movies as WMC won't have any problem playing from hidden folders, just put in your password when it comes time to watch your R rated movies and tada! It all works easy peasy.
If you would like to have all the artwork and synopsis and the full nine yards but don't feel like doing all that work I'd suggest just following this simple how to which provides links to the two little freeware programs that will set the whole thing up and do all the work for you. if you want the movies hidden from prying eyes when you first run Yammm which is the program that takes care of all the metadata and artwork simply check "hide playlist members" under settings (if you forget you'll find the config in your all programs or can type yam from the start box) and that is all there is to it, if the kid goes to the folder all he will see is an empty folder, the actual video files will be hidden. Too easy and you really don't have to do anything, just let it run its service (less than 35Mb when its downloading the artwork) and ignore it.
One word for the impatient, because the dev didn't want to slam the free movie DB he has it take its time downloading artwork, I've found with around 300 movies it takes about a day for the whole thing to be updated, but of course you can fire up WMC right away, it'll just take about a day for all the artwork and data about each individual movie to be integrated into WMC. But once it does...wow, you have a full synopsis with art, date the movie was made, genre, its all filled out, and of course for young and old its easier to just click on the poster of the movie you want instead of reading down a list,
so give it a try, I've been using this on my HTPCs as well as my own PC for a few months now and its great and if you add more movies later simply rerun file2folderGUI again, takes less than 10 seconds and it'll put everything in the correct folder format so the metadata can be applied.
First of all, are you 12 years old? if not then you should probably be informed that the SECOND you start typing "M$" the first thing 90% of the people that read these posts will do is say "douchebag" and pass right on by, so you could have the most insightful post in the world but nobody will give a fuck because you just labeled yourself as this guy aka "basement loser troll".
Second if you would have read my GP post I had already answered that this is NOT the "Star Trek Rule" as the Windows Blue memo makes it clear that as long as Ballmer is in charge there will be NO going back, its gonna be full retard ahead with MSFT making MSFT hardware running MSFT software sold in MSFT stores for a higher than Apple markup, because "God damn it we're better than Apple and we need to get the stock price up!"
Finally you are again wrong if you are referring to Win 7 over Vista, they did a complete gutting of most of the Vista code, new kernel, new memory subsystem, new driver subsystem, even the few things they kept from Vista like Readyboost and UAC got pretty big rewrites. Comparing Vista to 7 is like saying "Well Win98 and 2K3 Server are the same, its made by the same company so anybody who bought it was a sucker" while ignoring the incredible number of changes under the hood. Vista in many ways was WinME, where they had a couple of good ideas that were executed poorly and ultimately ended up with a broken mess whereas 7 like XP took those few good ideas and a bunch of major under the hood rewrites and rebuilds to make a truly solid product. In fact the only other MSFT product I can compare Win 7 to is 2K3 X64 workstation, aka WinXP X64, because in both cases you have a product that is just so much more rock solid than anything they had previously released it just isn't even funny. I have seen plenty of Vista BSODs working on customers machines because Vista screwed itself up but only with XP X64 and Win 7 have I never seen a BSOD that wasn't related to a hardware failure.
Linux is a corpse and will be gone in less than 5 years from all places outside the server room, it'll be locked down boxes like ChromeTops and iPads. And you have obviously never worked in a shop or you'd know rep and supporting what you sell is everything and Linux has such a piss poor record when it comes to shitting all over consumer drivers it ain't even funny. I'm sure if you use the power of the Google you'll find the "Hairyfeet Challenge" which i have posted for a couple of years now, still no takers because they know as well as i do what will happen in the end, the Windows machine will have 100% functioning drivers, even after the SPs and hundreds of updates, while the Linux machine will shit all over its own drivers and end up broken.
So thanks but no thanks, my time is $35 an hour and Linux simply costs more than Windows when it comes to after sales support. personally I blame Torvalds as every other OS ON THE PLANET has a stable driver ABI EXCEPT for Linux, BSD, Solaris, Windows, OSX, iOS, Android, fucking OS/2 has a stable ABI, Linux is the ONLY one that still has the drivers break on updates.
Its just a shame that ChromeOS is gonna be strictly black box and OEM only as i would be happy to give it a go, Google actually puts quality control into their products and don't break shit with every release like Torvalds and company.
Want some advice? Grab one of the 12 inch AMD netbooks while you can, a EEE 1215b, 1225b (make SURE its got a B at the end, otherwise its an Atom plus ION and sucks), or the HP DMZ1 are all GREAT choices and feel more like an ultraportable than a netbook.
I have the 1215B and it holds 8GB of RAM (got it for $30 and it was only $8 diff between 6GB and 8GB so I figured WTF) weighes less than 2.5 pounds, still gets 4 hours on a battery after 3 years (originally a little over 5 with BT and WiFi, nearly 6 without) does 1080P over HDMI, and just for shits and giggles I loaded some games on it and L4D, Portal 1&2, and Torchlight 1&2 all play great on it. Hell there are even videos of guys playing Crysis 2 on the DMZ1. Oh and full VM support so if I have to go to a dodgy website to get drivers for a customer i just fire up a Puppy Linux VM and get the drivers from there. So if it were me I'd be looking to grab one of those 12 inch AMD netbooks before they are gone, they really are great well built little units. There is even how tos to add a touchscreen or SSD if that is what you want.
But I agree after looking at it the ChromeBook "dev mode hack" looks like just that, a bad hack, and it appears to have more than a little finger crossing along with a lot of CLI bullshit. Personally I don't think jumping through that many hoops is worth it, especially when its unknown if doing so will void your warranty. With low priced units like that you get higher failure rates due to lack of quality control and i personally wouldn't want to risk voiding my warranty, I'd get one of those Win 8 quad laptops and use Start8 before i messed with all that crap.
I give you hard data, you return with bullshit. I provide multiple citations backing up my position, you return with anecdotes.
Sorry but until you can return with something other than "my best friend's cousin's gardener sold his PC for a tablet, swear to God!" I think I'm gonna have to go with the hard numbers. Now if you wanted to argue that tablets are taking the little niche that netbooks had? i agree, but I am gonna need something other than "I know some people" to show that any significant number is giving up PCs for tablets.
No they didn't, and its "karma" not "khama". The simple fact is the moronic Ballmernator killed Windows phone before the first unit ever shipped. You see the carriers want to take a page out of Ballmer's book and "Fucking kill Skype" because it cuts into the hefty profits they make, Ballmer like an idiot bought Skype (for waaaay too much money) and now the carriers wouldn't piss on a Windows phone if you gave it to them free.
Is Google being dickish about YouTube? Probably, after all like Ballmer and Skype they too paid waaay too much money for the thing and want to squeeze every last penny out of the property, but they might as well not bother screwing WinPhone because Ballmer did a better job than they ever could. I don't think in all my years in tech I've seen a company run THAT poorly before, but Ballmer can bitch and whine all he wants because as long as MSFT owns Skype you can give it up chuck, the phones ain't going nowhere.
You sir should be upmodded to a thousand, because this is something I've been trying to get the Linux advocates to understand for years...you HAVE to have Quickbooks, the SMBs live or die by Quickbooks and frankly the few ersatz FOSS programs out there trying to fit that niche are as bad a replacement as Gimp is a suitable replacement for Photoshop for graphics professionals.
I don't know how many SMBs I have that have their entire company, from inventory to accounting to taxes, run by a "Quickbooks girl" (and for some reason its almost ALWAYS a girl, you'd think they had a union or something) that everybody just hands the paperwork to and she takes care of the entire company. You really can't compare any other product to it, you really can run a whole business just with this one product and having it Windows only really is a deal breaker for Linux in the SMB market.
I'm sorry you are wrong, with Windows you have ONE company controlling the OS and the release has ONE kernel and ONE subsystem, whereas Linux is a bunch of prima donna devs that don't give a rat's ass what the other guys are doing, the kernel devs don't talk to the driver guys who don't talk to X-Server team who couldn't give a wet shit about the DE teams, so what you get is a big fucking mess held together with CLI and duct tape, oh lord the duct tape.
This is why Google will be able to succeed with Android and ChromeOS where Linux has failed, they have the money to fork the whole damned thing and say "Fuck you prima donnas, either you STFU and get your ass on board, using OUR SDK to build for OUR OS, or you can fuck right off because we don't care about your bullshit" and will be able to bring real quality control to the platform. Hell even Canonical couldn't pull this off as while they had their own bits on top they were still at the mercy of guys like the Pulse team and the kernel devs, which is why Dell has to run their own (badly out of date) repos just to support the piddling handful of hardware they sell Linux on, because the devs keep shitting all over their drivers. That is pretty fucking sad when you are talking about less than 2 dozen machines in the whole fucking line up.
That said you are 100% right that Windows IS too fucking high, which is why so many gamers pirate their OS. For quite awhile now MSFT under Ballmer has been fucking everyone, the OEMs, the consumer, the SMBs, the enterprise, because all Steve "Did you know I have a degree in marketing?" Ballmer gives a flying fuck about is Wall Street and the stock price, NOT selling a good product at an affordable price and thus gaining his company more share. He is the classic PHB, more like short sighted assholes like Bobby Kotick at Activision than Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, all the Ballmernator gives a shit about is squeeeezing every last red cent out of every thing he can to try to please the street and bump up the stock.
How many times have we seen this kind of ass cancer on American business, the CEO that only cares about fucking the customers for every dime he can and trying to pump up the stock price? And it ALWAYS ends the same, with the company in ruins. Westinghouse, Circuit City, EA, Activision, AMD, the list goes on and on of short sighted CEOs that only cared about shaking the customer for every cent and pumping the stock, it has NEVER ended on a happy note, just as it won't here.
Final prediction for MSFT, from the guy that called both Vista and Win 8 months before they came out (I got it half right on 7, I said fixing UAC did a BIG help to the OS but I didn't predict all the third party support for jumplists and for the OS itself making it such an easy drop in replacement for XP, I thought they would drag ass like they did on Vista) and my prediction is this: If Ballmer isn't fired in 3 years you'll see the desktops and laptops all but replaced by ChromeTops and ChromeBooks because the OEMs won't have any choice, it'll be switch or die, Apple will own the high end, Google the low, and MSFT will be the new RIM when they could have been the new IBM. Instead of hanging onto their legacy customers and then slowly moving into new markets like IBM did they are gonna burn the bridges and will end up with nothing but legacy business installs, and like RIM even those will be looking at exit strategies.
Again I have never seen any company just outright destroy itself with such a fundamentally stupid idea before, the closest I can compare it to is THQ putting themselves into bankruptcy by spending $110 million on a drawing tablet for the consoles and thinking that would actually ever be anything more than a teeny niche, or Atari buying more PacMan carts than their were 2600 consoles...but even THAT isn't THIS stupid, here they have 2 fucking years worth of data that says in 50 foot flaming letters that the consumers DO NOT WANT THIS and every single product tied to the new "Hey we'll just become Ap
This is true and on top of that they have completely switched designs, previous designs were VLIW and the new design is vector based GCN, so naturally when doing something as massive as a complete change to the architecture of the chip itself its gonna take some time to get all the bugs worked out.
Now that said this right here is why I always stay a couple of gens behind when it comes to GPUs, because frankly the higher end GPUs (the x8xx and x9xx chips especially) have been so badass that by staying a couple of gens behind you still get great graphics without nearly the headaches and at lower cost as well. I learned this lesson the hard way when I USED to be bleeding edge and found that by the time they had all the bugs worked out of the card, whether it be ATI or Nvidia, that the price of the card would have dropped by a pretty good amount leaving me feeling...well kinda dumb for buying bleeding edge just to be the beta tester. I understand how high tech these designs are so I don't blame 'em for selling the hardware before the software is done but that doesn't mean that I need to be the beta.
For an example I'm currently running an HD4850, these cards were nearly $300 when release, I paid $70 when the 6xxx chips came out and even today it still cranks out the pretty. Since its about to be 4 gens behind for my BDay in 2 months I'll move up to an HD6850 or HD6870, these cards were nearly $400 when first released, I'll pay $100-$120. I'll still have a 256bit graphics card, hell the one I'm looking at is 384bit so I may get an upgrade in that dept, and I'll double my GPU RAM while going from GDDR 3 to GDDR 5.
By sticking to a couple gen behind I can still play ALL the games, still have them look great enough people drool when they watch me do a "cool guys don't look at explosions" in something like Just Cause II, it saves me money and most importantly they have all the major bugs worked out by then so I can just plug it in and my games "just work" with no muss or fuss. Now if you'll excuse me I got a ton of games on the Steam Xmas sale and feel like a little Borderlands, when playing a franchise I like to go in story order.
What threats? This is simply a perfect example of those that say "Oh you don't need guns" showing why THEY don'y need guns....because they can HIRE guns! What, you don't have the money to hire guns? Then get robbed or killed you filthy peasant! We shall drink our fancy coffees with our private armies and laugh at your misery...hah!
I'm sorry but if you went from 8GB to 32GB and it suddenly slowed down and got crashy and your IT dept didn't catch it? Then they ain't all that hot. A LOT of boards have serious problems with setting the correct RAM timings when you do a huge upgrade like that, also many boards simply won't take what I call "hot" RAM that pulls a little more juice than spec. let me guess...running high speed DDR 3, yes? Most of the really high speed DDR 3 is "hot" RAM and frankly you need the RAM approved by the OEM that made the board or a gamer board made to run hot RAM to run it. Check the UEFI settings and look at what voltages and speeds its reporting, compare this to the board specs, then run Memtest on the RAM. Five will get you ten that memtest will NOT pass on that board.
You can't really blame Windows if you just throw an upgrade in there willy nilly and not do your homework which is what it sounds like here. Frankly most of the fast speed DDR 3 is running out of spec and I've seen the speeds the stick will run stably at vary pretty damned wildly, even when you are talking matched pairs from the same company. Also remember with RAM so cheap these companies cut corners left and right and QC isn't what it used to be, I'm seeing a LOT more RAM that doesn't pass muster, either it has bad cells or simply won't run at its higher rated speeds. If it doesn't pass memtest its a bad chip or clocked too high, try setting the RAM timings manually, starting at its lowest setting, then run memtest again and see if it passes. But I have seen this kind of a reaction a LOT in the faster clocked memory which is what I bet you are running, most that go out and get 32GB of RAM is gonna go for the fastest they can find.
Sorry but you are wrong and here is why: when looking at the numbers and comparing them to the previous year at the exact same period, which just FYI had an even worse economic outlook than we did this year, computer sales are down by more than 13% and I'm sorry but you don't have THAT big a drop, especially during the run up to Xmas, unless something is REALLY wrong or you have a product people don't want to buy. Even the OEMs are flat footed saying that Win 8 units just aren't selling which is why you see more and more places like Tiger showing Win 7 machines for sale, nobody wants Win 8.
So frankly it doesn't have a damned thing to do with ME or MY opinion, honestly if I wanted to i could put up with the bullshit or just hack the shell, i just don't see enough benefits to put up with bullshit like tying everything to a MSFT Live account or hacking the shell to make it worth fooling with. Nope what this is about is the simple fact that this is the typical user reaction to Windows 8 only she doesn't get frustrated as badly or curse like many of those trying it at the shop did. Hell I got people calling me I haven't heard from in years going "You still got that shop? Yeah see i went to look at Best Buy for a laptop and all they had was that 'weird new Windows' and I REALLY don't like it. Is there any way you can get me one with the 'good Windows' on it?"
It has NOTHING to do with opinion, or taste, it has to do with the fact MSFT put out a Frankenstein mess of an OS, designed for an interface that less than 2% of ALL computers made or even sold in stores even has, and which is NOT intuitive, or discoverable, or in any way easier or friendlier than the product that came before. I'm not the one writing articles like "Windows 8..Yes it is THAT bad" I'm simply pointing out the reasons WHY it is THAT bad, just as I did with Vista. Sadly by SP2 they had pretty much fixed the problems with Vista but people had already moved on, I honestly don't think they can fix Windows 8. Even if they kill the Metro UI you still have everything being tied to a MSFT account, ads in the OS, and a mish mash of ribbonized and non ribbonized programs. Not to mention there are SOME controls you can only get to through control panel in desktop mode and SOME that you can only get through metro so unlike some here I don't think they can just "patch metro away" as they moved too much crap into it already.
Like it or not there isn't gonna be a Windows anymore, you are gonna have Apple and ersatz Apple, MSFT is even announced they are building their own hardware and Surface was just the start, you'll have MSFTPhone and MSFTDesktop and MSFTLaptop, all probably priced even higher than Apple just to cement the fail like they did with Surface pricing compared to iPad.
So while you ARE correct that not as many are buying and NO its not that they are replacing them with cellphones like the press keeps harping about, or with tablets, but the average user just can't stress out even a first gen Core Duo or Phenom X4 you just don't have numbers drop THAT bad unless you have a product that the customer is turned off by, and that is Win 8 in a nutshell.
I looked at the cheap upgrade as well, I was gonna buy a copy and stick it in a corner in case i ran into software in the future that needed Win 8 but the "We tie everything to your account oh and do you have a CC? We have an appstore ya know" was the fucking deal breaker for me. When I took advantage of the Win 7 cheap upgrade i got a nice little green box, no different than the retail upgrade in stores, and on install it asked if I wanted upgrade or clean and since it was a new drive there was no "OMG you gotta have zee Windows previous installed" crap and away it went. I was impressed enough I turned around and bought the family pack and switched the whole household over.
Now they want you to pay nearly double for a fricking disc, it checks for an install so you have to jump through THAT hoop, and as you pointed out its picky as fuck about that, and of course then the final straw about the accounts. I'm sure its so they can try to push you into their appstore but I don't give a fuck, if they have a good appstore I'd use it but I'll be damned if they get me on it by bugging the fuck out of me and tying everything to it which is just a security nightmare. so if my fricking Windows Live I had to set up for Bioshock II gets hacked my fricking desktop is vulnerable too? Fuck that noise.
I'll hang onto Win 7 until/unless games stop being released for it which by then hopefully either ballmer's fat stupid ass will be fired or somebody will have a viable exit strategy for us gamers that doesn't involve a shitty console, maybe Valve will hook up with the Crossover guys so that the DirectX games will work in Linux who knows. All I know is after running Win 8 from CP to RTM waiting for them to fix the obvious stupidity only to see they actually thought it was a good idea I wouldn't take Win 8 on a bet, I'd fricking use that Vista Basic disc i got setting in the shop before i touch Windows 8 again, I hate it THAT much.
But is that VOTING stock or just class B stock? You DO know there is a difference, yes? this is why guys like Zuckerberg and Ellison can control the company even as they sell stock, because they have class A which counts higher when it comes to voting compared to class B or "common" stock.
So that link you have doesn't really tell us either way, because it doesn't list whether those holders have class A, class B, or a mix of the 2.
Not to mention in every town there is one or more shops that are happy to sell you Windows 7, be it on desktops or laptops, and of course for the past...ohh I'd say at least the last 5 years or so, computers have frankly been so insanely overpowered compared to what the customers actually do with the thing there simply isn't a real reason to upgrade before they die which can be quite awhile. Hell most of my customers simply had me install Win 7 on the systems they had bought from me with XP, why? Because they were duals,triples, and quads and so overpowered that they do everything they want them to so why buy another before that one dies?
But for any of those that think "Win 8 is just the 'Star Trek Rule' in action" nope, take a gooood look as Ballmer has made it clear in his "Windows Blue" memo that this is it, you can have Apple or overpriced MSFT hardware pretending to be Apple, they are gonna copy everything down to the stores and making their own hardware and trying to lock everything down into a black box appstore centric model, so Win 7 is pretty much the last real copy of Windows if Ballmer doesn't get fired.
Frankly I don't see how the OEMs have any choice, MSFT is already fucking the living hell out of them when it comes to Windows licenses (now rumored to be over $50 a copy for Windows Home, with NO breaks on price no matter how many they buy) and is gonna be trying to actively destroy them with their own MSFT branded hardware in 2013. So they really don't have a choice here, either they close their doors or they find a new supplier and I have a feeling Google will be happy to take that business. I predict if the board doesn't quit smoking crack and fire the Ballmernator that in less than 3 years you'll see all the OEMs pushing ChromeTops and ChromeBooks and they'll have a few VERY expensive Windows machines in the corner that they won't advertise and won't give a shit about because it would be like Kmart pushing Walmart brands, all you are doing is helping the company that wants to put you out of business.
So while the ChromeBooks are limted to online now I have a feeling by summer of this year you are gonna see a TON of new models, in all different sizes and prices, all over the retailers and the online. I mean what else can they do? Its that or do like Nvidia did with chipsets and just close the doors, MSFT has made it clear the "future" of Windows is MSFT OSes running on MSFT hardware sold from a MSFT store with a very high MSFT markup, no way they are gonna sell Windows licenses cheap enough for the OEMs to keep selling against them.
To me the sad part will be the death of DIY and the little shops, because as we have seen with the latest Chromebooks they are getting more and more locked down (hell you can't even run Linux on the things without 3 pages worth of CLI and a LOT of finger crossing) so what you will end up with is disposable black boxes, more like cellphones than today's desktops and laptops.
And sorry about the length but this really fucking depresses me, not because of the shop as I've been moving more into home theaters and security setups anyway, but because it looks like we are going back to the 80s with everything locked down and proprietary, its all gonna be soldered chips that boot from locked BIOS into a locked OS that requires everything go through an appstore owned by the company that owns the OS, but people standing in line to buy overpriced iToys have convinced the IT world that that is what people want,locked down appliances instead of general purpose computing. Fucking shame and I have a feeling the next decade or two is gonna really suck balls and computers will pile up in the landfills like old gaming consoles because you won't be able to do jack shit with them when the corps stop supporting it, but that is what the consumer seems to want.
That is why I have to LMAO at that video the Win 8 apologists keep showing of the 4 year old using Win 8, you know what that video ACTUALLY proves? That 4 year olds have an infinite amount of time and when handed a shiny toy will fuck with it for hours and hours, especially if you can make it "do stuff". hell look at how many hours we wasted when we were little trying to draw anything on an etch a sketch.
I had a Win 8 system in the shop for 7 months for users to play with. Want to see what happens when a person who is NOT 4 years old and doesn't have infinite time uses Win 8? Well here ya go it was pretty much this only with a growing frustration and eventual cursing. its bad when people I haven't seen in years stop me on the street and say "I went to look at a laptop at Best Buy for Christmas and all they had was that new funny Windows and it was just terrible! Can you get me the REAL Windows on a laptop?" which of course "real" always is referring to Win 7.
The bitch is I have been told that it may not be possible to fire Ballmer short of a hostile takeover, because between him and his BFF Bill they own more than 50% of the voting stock. Now if that is true or not I don't know, but if it is true that means it would take old Bill turning on Steve for anything to be done, otherwise the house that Bill built will be the house that Steve knocks down.
I'm afraid that is incorrect, Intel started working on Secure Boot after Blue Pill was shown at Black Hat. If you didn't hear about Blue Pill it was a hack that allowed malware to use the hardware VM support built into the Intel chips to basically shunt the OS onto a VM so that once deployed the malware writer still had control via the hypervisor while you could scan with any scanner you wanted, offline or on, it wasn't gonna catch it or stop it. Needless to say with intel making so much off the server and desktop markets having a bug be able to completely pwn their chips was NOT something they were happy about. Also remember that Intel was on board for the TPM chip and using it for something similar to Secure Boot until everyone had a living shitfit because it would allow DRM so much control over a system.
is MSFT taking advantage and licensing Secure Boot for their ARM products? you betcha but when it comes to who made it and who pushed it that was all Intel just as UEFI is also Intel's baby. This is of course why AMD went with Coreboot, they didn't like the idea of having to pay Intel license fees for every single board their chips are on and Coreboot is free software, both as in beer and freedom.
Sigh...now do you HONESTLY think a business deployment uses NOTHING but a browser? Really? Don't even bring up Libre Office because there is enough incompatibility with Excel and Access to make it a non starter, so frankly the only way you are gonna convert a business over to Linux from Windows is 1.-They pay developers to build native versions of whatever they use or 2.-They only use a browser.
Because supporting many an SMB I can tell you its NEVER the OS, Linux has enough DEs frankly you can make it look and act like anything you want, there are even skins that will make it look like XP if that makes you happy. Nope its ALWAYS the half a dozen "must have mission critical" apps they use that there is NEVER a Linux version for that bites you in the ass. Your Quicken/Quickbooks, your little custom VB and IE intranet apps, the software the head office gives you to input and validate CC numbers ALL of that stuff is Windows only and the cost to get ALL of your data out of whatever format its in and get it into one that a Linux program could use AND paying devs to build new versions of that niche software? frankly makes the cost of Linux several orders of magnitude more than just staying with Windows.
This is why I predict if MSFT doesn't change course like RIM they are gonna end up with a bunch of legacy business customers and not much else, because it will cause the businesses too much to switch and with software assurance contracts they can just stay on Win 7 and not give a shit what MSFT does for the next 7 years. Hell look at how many companies are still running XP, businesses don't care about latest and greatest, all they care about is does their niche software run and the answer on Linux is no so they'll stick with an older version of Windows and call it a day. After all if MSFT doesn't change course they'll still get 5 more years of support on Win 7 before they need to start looking at exit strategies and 7 more years before its EOL.
What is funny is these PR firms are apparently lazy as hell as I've noticed when someone will post a criticism of Win 8 a hell of a lot of the time the "its great!" Win 8 response you'll get back you can drop a line of in Google and they've posted the same reply word for word across dozens of sites, its like the fricking Nigerian prince emails. I don't know which is funnier, the shill copypasta or the "Oh that is not a problem, all you have to do is (big pile of keyboard crap)" which of course i just HAVE to reply with "So THIS is innovation? We need cheat sheets for our OSes again like its 1985?"
I have never seen a company in all my years just up and completely destroy themselves like this, damnedest thing I've ever seen. For those that think Win 8 is just the "Star Trek Rule" in action you might want to look up the "Windows Blue" memo, in it Ballmer lays out what he is doing in 2013 to "save Microsoft"...ready? He is gonna fuck the hell out of the OEMs and pretty much kill Nokia so that MSFT can make phones (just like Apple) tablets (ditto) desktops (notice a pattern?) and laptops (Ray Charles could see through this) and all of which will be priced HIGHER than anything Apple is offering, because dammit high prices MUST mean its good, after all people buy Apple right?
So congrats MSFT haters, you are gonna get to see the company completely self destruct as the PHB in charge torpedoes everything that Gates spent 20+ years building because he is too damned stupid to realize you can't slap a coat of paint on a Pinto and have it compete with Porsche. It took Apple decades to build its rep as a high end brand, Ballmer thinks all he has to do is triple the pricetag on everything and voila! Suddenly Windows is hip and trendy...NOT!
If the board doesn't stop smoking crack and fire this moron I predict in 3 years Apple will own the top, Google will own the bottom, and MSFT will be RIM, with nothing left but legacy business installs and even those will be looking at exit strategies. The truly sad part of it all is the day of the DIY desktop will end, you'll buy a black box Android or Apple and that will be that, unless you have workstation money it'll all be black box like the ChromeBooks.
Because they are outnumbered by about 50 to one by the supermegacorps and the lobbyists working for supermegacorp, who can outspend them something like 100 times over when it comes to buying politicians?
I mean you have exactly ONE, and only one, billion dollar corp and they are just barely over the billion dollar mark. Now look at how much Apple and the big media corps have by way of comparison and then realize thanks to all the tax dodges you are only looking at probably a third of how much they REALLY have. You think kernel.org, Moz,and RH along with the FSF can stand in the room with those guys and not get outbid by several orders of magnitude?
The reasons corps shouldn't be allowed to "speak" with money is because their "speech" quickly drowns out the people. it is SUPPOSED to be one man one vote but with corps being allowed to be treated as people suddenly some people are simply worth more and therefor better than everybody else, and that is just fucked up. Just because you can name a couple of corps that aren't complete douchebags doesn't magically tip the scales in favor of corps, because for every one FSF you have a dozen Goldman Sachs and *.AAs.
Get it, I pointed one of my customers to one when the EEE PC 1215B and 1225Bs were hard to find and he fricking loves it, great performance and decent battery life. I have an AMD Fusion based (E350 1215B) and I have to say it'll run anything I'd want to run on a laptop and still gets over 4 hours after 3 years on the battery, hell I can even game on the thing if I'm stuck somewhere and bored.
BTW if you want even more battery life check out Brazos Tweaker, its a free program that will let you undervolt the chip and change the P-States for even longer battery life, but I get long enough on mine I never bothered. that said on the comments of the Brazos Tweaker website they already have the settings posted for most of the popular units including the DMZ1 and users were reporting up to an extra hour and a half on the battery, not too shabby.
After playing with one frankly if they put me in charge of ChromeOS I could kick the living snot out of Windows in less than 2 years, as it really only has 2 major problems that need fixing. 1.- it needs to lose requiring a 24/7 connection, Google has partially fixed this with Google drive but its still not enough, it needs the ability like Android to run anything on the system with ZERO net access. There are just too many places where free Wifi isn't available to make everything cloud based yet. 2.- Lack of support for popular Windows legacy apps, this could be fixed by Google buying Crossover and bundling that into ChromeOS, with some Google engineers helping out I'm sure you could make Crossover "clicky clicky" simple and it already supports most of the major programs and games so it really wouldn't be hard to do.
If Google did that they could still get all the search data while at the same time taking a large portion of the low end. Frankly MSFT is committing suicide under Ballmer who has made it clear he intends to fuck the OEMs and make MSFT into an ersatz Apple by having them make all their own (overpriced) hardware including phones, desktops, and laptops. Just as the gang of nine got together back in the day and fucked IBM who were trying to do the same thing with OS/2 and the MCA bus so too could Google snatch the OEMs away from MSFT. Its clear the OEMs are NOT happy with MSFT price gouging and using the money they pay to try to squeeze them out of the market and since Google is really more interested in the search data than building hardware this would be a perfect time to swoop in and take the OEMs away from MSFT.
I could easily see a year or so from now the OEMs having tons of different model ChromeBooks and ChromeTops in all different kinds of forms and prices while having a couple of overpriced MSFT Windows units in the corner, it really wouldn't be hard to do as I'd say a good 70%+ of what your average PC user does is net related anyway. A true offline mode would take care of when they are out and no network is available, and Crossover would let them have those one or two "must have" Windows programs. Hell Google could get Valve to port Steam to the ChromeOS and have it work with Crossover to support more and more legacy DirectX games, for the first time in years I could see a day when Windows is nothing but a little niche on the computing landscape.
How so? I can only use the 1215 EEE PC I own and an Acer the same size a customer owns as examples i've used, but they had the battery life (mine got 5 when new, still gets 4 after 3 years, hers got nearly 7 new and a little over 5 now but she has the C60 to my E350), the portability, and the affordable price (I paid $350 for mine with 8GB memory upgrade and case, she got hers for $270) and they did everything a netbook should do, plenty of ports, easy to surf on, and runs most software just fine. In fact I often use mine at the band's practice place to load up and edit multitrack audio on the fly, works great for the basic scratch edits.
So I'd say you are wrong, the only other units I've seen at the 12 inch form factor are either grossly overpriced like the ultrabooks/air or have a crippled OS like the Chromebooks which are worthless if you don't have 24/7 access to Wifi. For those of us that wanted a cheap portable computer with decent performance that didn't make you squint or squeeze your fingers together on a teeny keyboard I think they were the perfect compromise and I will be babying the shit out of my netbook now that I can't get a replacement.
Meh I still say the 12 inchers were the perfect form factor, keyboard big enough to be comfortable, weight still under 3 pounds (my EEE 1215B weighs 2.2 pounds) and the AMD ones frankly were powerful little units, not only can mine get nearly 4 hours on a 3 year old battery but I can plug into any TV and do 1080P over HDMI and for shits and giggles tried gaming on it and GTA:VC, L4D, Torchlight I&II and the Portal series all ran great, there are even videos on YouTube of guys running Crysis 2 on the things.
This will just mean I'll hang onto my EEE for dear life, its a great little unit. I upgraded to 8GB of RAM on the cheap, built in VM support means I can fire up an instance of Puppy Linux when I have to go to a dodgy website to get drivers for a customer in the field, has USB 3 and can charge other devices which is a plus as no need to carry extra cables.
All in all I'd say its a great unit and its a shame MSFT shat all over the market by charging too damned much for Windows licenses (reports are that Win 7 Starter was $35 a copy and Win 7 HP $50) but considering the company is currently being destroyed by Steve "I want to work at Cupertino dammit!" Ballmer the fact that they just fucked themselves out of yet another market really isn't all that surprising. Its a shame that Linux didn't work out on the netbooks but I blame the distros for that, they have frankly been putting out unrealistic as hell system requirements for years which gave the OEMs an excuse to get rid of all their old weak hardware by using Linux with it, just look at the slow as hell SSDs, the weak CPUs and skimpy memory they used when linux was on it, you could really tell they were using the chips they couldn't sell for the Linux units and it really showed when it came to performance. Finally you have Intel that of course used it to shove their shit Atom chips onto the market, those chips were just garbage and using anything with an Atom in it was just painful.